Jack Burnham

Systems Esthetics
Reprinted from Artforum (September, 1968). Copyright 1968 by
Jack Burnham.

A polarity is presently developing between the finite, unique work of

high art, that is, painting or sculpture, and conceptions that can
loosely be termed unobjects, these being either environments or
artifacts that resist prevailing critical analysis. This includes works by
some primary sculptors (though 0 some may reject the charge of
creating environments), some gallery kinetic and luminous art, some
outdoor works, happenings, and mixed media presentations.
Looming below the surface of this dichotomy is a sense of radical
evolution that seems to run counter to the waning revolution of
abstract and nonobjective art. The evolution embraces a series of
absolutely logical and incremental changes, wholly devoid of the
fevered iconoclasm that accompanied the heroic period from 1907 to
1925. As yet the evolving esthetic has no critical vocabulary so
necessary for its defense, nor for that matter a name or explicit cause.

In a way this situation might be likened to the "morphological

development" of a prime scientific concept-as described by Thomas
Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn sees
science at any given period dominated by a single "major
paradigm"; that is, a scientific conception of the natural order so
pervasive and intellectually powerful that it dominates all ensuing
scientific discovery. Inconsistent facts arising through
experimentation are invariably labeled as bogus or trivial-until the
emergence of a new and more encompassing general theory.
Transition between major paradigms may best express the state of
present art. Reasons for it lie in the nature of current technological
shifts.

The economist, J. K. Galbraith, has rightly insisted that until recently

the needs of the modern industrial state were never served by
complete expression of the esthetic impulse. Power and expansion
were its primary aims.

Special attention should be paid to Galbraith's observation. As an

arbiter of impending socio-technical changes his position is pivotal.
For the Left he represents America's most articulate apologist for
Monopoly Capitalism; for the Right he is the socialist eminence grise
of the Democratic Party. In The New Industrial State (1967) he
challenges both Marxist orthodoxies and American mythologies
premised upon laissez-faire capitalism. For them he substitutes an
incipient technocracy shaped by the evolving technostructure. Such a
drift away from ideology has been anticipated for at least fifty years.
Already in California think-tanks and in the central planning
committees of each soviet, futurologists are concentrating on the role
of the technocracy, that is, its decision-making autonomy, how it
handles the central storage of information, and the techniques used
for smoothly implementing social change. In the automated state
power resides less in the control of the traditional symbols of wealth
than in information.

In the emergent "superscientific culture" long-range decision-

making and its implementation become more difficult and more
necessary. Judgment demands precise socio-technical models.
Earlier the industrial state evolved by filling consumer needs on a
piecemeal basis. The kind of product design that once produced
"better living" precipitates vast crises in human ecology In the 1960s.
A striking parallel exists between the "new" car of the automobile
stylist and the syndrome of formalist invention in art, where
"discoveries" are made through visual manipulation. Increasingly
"products"-either in art or life-become irrelevant and a different set of
needs arise: these t revolve around such concerns as maintaining the
biological livability of the earth, producing more accurate models of
social interaction, understanding [ the growing symbiosis in man-
machine relationships, establishing priorities for the usage and
conservation of natural resources, and defining alternate patterns of
education, productivity, and leisure. In the past our technologically-
conceived artifacts structured living patterns. We are now in
transition M from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture.
Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are
done.
 The priorities of the present age revolve around the problems of
organization. A systems viewpoint is focused on the creation of
stable, on-going relationships between organic and nonorganic
systems, be these neighbor hoods, industrial complexes, farms,
transportation systems, information 0 centers, recreation centers, or
any of the other matrices of human activity. All living situations must
be treated in the context of a systems hierarchy of values. Intuitively
many artists have already grasped these relatively recent distinctions,
and if their "environments" are on the unsophisticated side, this will
change with time and experience.

The major tool for professionally defining these concerns is systems

analysis. This is best known through its usage by the Pentagon and
has more to do with the expense and complexity of modern warfare,
than with any innate relation between the two. Systems analysts are
not cold-blooded logicians; the best have an ever-expanding grasp
of human needs and limitations. One of the pioneers of systems
applications, E. S. Quade, has stated that "Systems analysis,
particularly the type required for military decisions, is still largely a
form of art. Art can be taught in part, but not by the means of fixed
rules.... " ' Thus "The Further Dimensions" elaborated upon by
Galbraith in his book are esthetic criteria. Where for some these
become the means for tidying up a derelict technology, for Galbraith
esthetic decision-making becomes an integral part of any future
technocracy. As yet few governments fully appreciate that the
alternative is biological self-destruction.

Situated between aggressive electronic media and two hundred

years of industrial vandalism, the long held idea that a tiny output of
art objects could somehow "beautify" or even significantly modify
the environment was naive. A parallel illusion existed in that artistic
influence prevails by a psychic osmosis given off by such objects.
Accordingly lip service to public beauty remains the province of
well-guarded museums. Through the early stages of industrialism it
remained possible for decorative media, including painting and
sculpture, to embody the esthetic impulse; but as technology
progresses this impulse must identify itself with the means of
research and production. Obviously nothing could be less true for the
present situation. In a society thus estranged only the didactic
function of art continues to have meaning. The artist operates as a
quasipolitical provocateur, though in no concrete sense is he an
ideologist or a moralist. L'art pour l'art and a century's resistance to
the vulgarities of moral uplift have insured that.

The specific function of modern didactic art has been to show that
art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between
people and between people and the components of their
environment. This accounts for the radicality of Duchamp and his
enduring influence. It throws light on Picasso's lesser position as a
seminal force. As with all succeeding formalist art, cubism followed
the tradition of circumscribing art value wholly within finite objects.

In an advanced technological culture the most important artist best

succeeds by liquidating his position as artist vis-a-vis society.
Artistic nihilism established itself through this condition. At the
outset the artist refused to participate in idealism through craft.
"Craft-fetishism," as termed by the critic Christopher Caudwell,
remains the basis of modern formalism. Instead the significant artist
strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his
artistic output and the productive means of society. Duchamp,
Warhol, and Robert Morris are similarly directed in this respect.
Gradually this strategy transforms artistic and technological
decision-making into a single activity-at least it presents that
alternative in inescapable terms. Scientists and technicians are not
converted into "artists," rather the artist becomes a symptom of the
schism between art and technics. Progressively the need to make
ultrasensitive judgments as to the uses of technology and scientific
information becomes "art" in the most literal sense. As yet the
implication that art contains survival value is nearly as suspect as
attaching any moral significance to it. Though with the demise of
literary content, the theory that art is a form of psychic preparedness
has gained articulate supporters.
Art, as an adaptive mechanism, is reinforcement of the ability to be
aware of the disparity between behavioral pattern and the demands
consequent upon the interaction with the environment. Art is
rehearsal for those real situations in which it is vital for our survival to
endure cognitive tension, to refuse the comforts of validation by
affective congruence when such validation Is inappropriate because
too vital interests are at stake....
The post-formalist sensibility naturally responds to stimuli both
within and outside the proposed art format. To this extent some of it
does begin to resemble "theater," as imputed by Michael Fried. More
likely though, the label of theatricality is a red herring disguising the
real nature of the shift in priorities. In respect to Mr. Fried's
argument, the theater was never a purist medium, but a conglomerate
of arts. In itself this never prevented the theater from achieving "high
art." For clearer reading, rather than maintaining Mr. Fried's
adjectives, theatrical or literalist art, or the phrase used until now in
this essay, post-formalist esthetic, the term systems esthetic seems to
encompass the present situation more fully.

The systems approach goes beyond a concern with staged

environments and happenings; it deals in a revolutionary fashion with
the larger problem of boundary concepts. In systems perspective
there are no contrived confines such as the theater proscenium or
picture frame. Conceptual focus rather than material limits define the
system. Thus any situation, either in or outside the context of art, may
be designed and judged as a system. Inasmuch as a system may
contain people, ideas, messages, atmospheric conditions, power
sources, and so on, a system is, to quote the systems biologist,
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a "complex of components in interaction,"
comprised of material, energy, and information in various degrees of
organization. In evaluating systems the artist is a perspectivist
considering goals, boundaries, structure, input, output, and related
activity inside and outside the system. Where the object almost
always has a fixed shape and boundaries, the consistency of a system
may be altered in time and space, its behavior determined both by
external conditions and its mechanisms of control.

In his book, The New Vision, Moholy-Nagy described fabricating a

set of enamel on metal paintings. These were executed by
telephoning precise: instructions to a manufacturer. An elaboration of
this was projected recently by the director of the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago, Jan van der Marck, in a tentative
exhibition, "Art by Telephone." In this instance the recorded
conversation between artist and manufacturer was to become part of
the displayed work of art. For systems, information, in whatever form
conveyed, becomes a viable esthetic consideration.
 Fifteen years ago Victor Vasarely suggested mass art as a legitimate
function of industrial society. For angry critics there existed the fear
of undermining art's fetish aura, of shattering the mystique of craft
and private creation. If some forays have been made into serially
produced art, these remain on the periphery of the industrial system.
Yet the entire phenomenon of reproducing an art object ad infinitum
is absurd; rather than making quality available to a large number of
people, it signals the end of concrete objects embodying visual
metaphor. Such demythification is the Kantian Imperative applied
esthetically. On the other hand, a system esthetic is literal in that all
phases of the life cycle of a system are relevant. There is no end
product that is primarily visual, nor does such an esthetic rely on a
"visual" syntax. It resists functioning as an applied esthetic, but is
revealed in the principles underlying the progressive reorganization
of the natural environment.

Various postures implicit in formalist art were consistently attacked

in the later writings of Ad Reinhardt. His black paintings were
hardly rhetorical devices (nor were his writings) masking Zen
obscurities; rather they were the means of discarding formalist
mannerism and all the latent illusionism connected with postrealistic
art. His own contribution he described as:
The one work for the fine artist, tile one painting, is the painting of
the onesized canvas... The single theme, one formal device, one
color-monochrome one linear division in each direction, one
symmetry, one texture, one free-hand brushing, one rhythm, one
working everything into dissolution and one indivisibility, each
painting into one overall uniformity and nonirregularity.

Even before the emergence of the anti-formalist "specific object"

there appeared an oblique type of criticism, resisting emotive and
literary associations. Pioneered between 1962 and 1965 in the
writings of Donald Judd, it resembles what a computer programmer
would call an entity's list structure, or all the enumerated properties
needed to physically rebuild an object. Earlier the phenomenologist,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, asserted the impossibility of conceptually
reconstructing an object from such a procedure. Modified to include
a number of perceptual insights not included in a "list structure,"
such a technique has been used to real advantage by the antinovelist,
Alain Robbe-Crillet. A web of sensorial descriptions is spun around
the central images of a plot. The point is not to internalize scrutiny in
the Freudian sense, but to infer the essence of a situation through
detailed examination of surface effects. Similar attitudes were
adopted by Judd for the purpose of critical examination. More than
simply an art object's list structure, Judd included phenomenal
qualities which would have never shown up in a fabricator's plans,
but which proved necessary for the "seeing" of the object. This
cleared the air of much criticism centered around meaning and
private intention.

It would be misleading to interpret Judd's concept of "specific

objects" as the embodiment of a systems esthetic. Rather object art
has become a stage towards further rationalization of the esthetic
process in general-both by reducing the iconic content of art objects
and by Judd's candidness about their conceptual origins. However,
even in 1965 he gave indications of looking beyond these finite
limits.
A few of the more general aspects may persist, such as the work's
being like an object or even being specific, but other characteristics
are bound to develop. Since its range is wide, three-dimensional
work will probably divide into a number of forms. At any rate, it will
be larger than painting and much larger than sculpture, which,
compared to painting, is fairly particular.... Because the nature of
three dimension isn't set, given beforehand, something credible can
be made, almost anything.

In the 1966 "68th American Show" at the Chicago Art Institute, the
sculptor, Robert Morris, was represented by two large, L-shaped
forms which were shown the previous year in New York. Morris
sent plans of the pieces to the carpenters at the Chicago museum
where they were assembled for less than the cost of shipping the
originals from New York. In the context of a systems esthetic,
possession of a privately fabricated work is no longer important.
Accurate information takes priority over history and geographical
location.

Morris was the first essayist to precisely describe the relation

between sculpture style and the progressively more sophisticated use
of industry by artists. He has lately focused upon material-forming
techniques and me arrangement of these results so that they no
longer form specific objects but remain uncomposed. In such
handling of materials the idea of process takes precedence over end
results: "Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms and
orders of things is a positive assertion." Such loose assemblies of
materials encompass concerns that resemble the cycles of industrial
processing. Here the traditional priority of end results over technique
breaks down; in a systems context both may share equal importance,
remaining essential parts of the esthetic.

Already Morris has proposed systems that move beyond the

confines of the minimal object. One work proposed to the City of
New York last fall was later included in Willoughby Sharp's "Air
Art" show in a YMHA gallery in Philadelphia. In its first state
Morris's piece involved capturing steam from the pipes in the city
streets, projecting this from nozzles on a platform. In Philadelphia
such a system took its energy from the steam-bath room. Since 1966
Morris's interests have included designs for low relief earth
sculptures consisting of abutments, hedges, and sodded mounds,
visible from the air and not unlike Indian burial mounds.
"Transporting" one of these would be a matter of cutting and filling
earth and resodding. Morris is presently at work on one such project
and unlike past sculptural concerns, it involves precise information
from surveyors, landscape gardeners, civil engineering contractors,
and geologists. In the older context, such as Isamu Noguchi's
sunken garden at Yale University's Rare Book Library, sculpture
defined the environment; with Morris's approach the environment
defines what is sculptural.

More radical for the gallery are the constructions of Carl Andre. His
assemblies of modular, unattached forms stand out from the works of
artists who have comprised unit assembly with the totality of fixed
objects. The mundane origins of Andre's units are not "hidden"
within the art work as in he technique of collage. Andre's floor reliefs
are architectural modifications -though they are not subliminal since
they visually disengage from their surroundings. One of Andre's
subtler shows took place in New York last year. 8 The viewer was
encouraged to walk stocking-footed across three areas. each 12 by
12 feet and composed by 144 one-foot-square metal plates. One was
not only invited to see each of these "rugs" as a grid arrangement in
various | metals, but each metal grid's thermal conductivity was
registered through the [ soles of the feet. Sight analysis diminishes in
importance for some of the best new work; the other senses and
especially kinesthesis makes "viewing" a more integrated
experience. The scope of a systems esthetic presumes that problems
cannot be solved by a single technical solution, but must be attacked
on a multileveled, interdisciplinary basis. Consequently some of the
more aware sculptors no longer think like sculptors, but they assume
a span of problems more natural to architects, urban planners, civil
engineers, electronic technicians, and cultural anthropologists. This is
not as pretentious as some critics have insisted. It is a legitimate
extension of McLuhan's remark about Pop Art when he said that it
was an announcement that the entire environment was ready to
become a work of art.

As a direct descendant of the "found object," Robert Smithson's

identifying mammoth engineering projects as works of art ("Site-
Selections") makes eminent sense. Refocusing the esthetic away
from the preciousness of the work of art is in the present age no less
than a survival mechanism. If Smithson's "Site-Selections" are
didactic exercises, they show ; a desperate need for environmental
sensibility on a larger than room scale. Sigfried Giedion pointed to
specific engineering feats as objets d'art thirty years ago. Smithson
has transcended this by putting engineering works into their natural
settings and treating the whole as a time-bound web of man nature
interactions.

Methodologically Les Levine is possibly the most consistent

exponent of a systems esthetic. His environments of vacuum-formed,
modular plastic units are never static; by means of experiencing
ambulation through them, they consistently alter their own degree of
space-surface penetrability. Levine's Clean Machine has no ideal
vantage points, no "pieces" to recognize, as are implicit in formalist
art. One is processed as in driving through the Holland Tunnel.
Certainly this echoes Michael Fried's reference to Tony Smith's
night time drive along the uncompleted New Jersey Turnpike" Yet if
this is theater, as Fried insists, it is not the stage concerned with
focused upon events. That has more to do with the boundary
definitions that have traditionally circumscribed classical and post-
classical art. In a recent environment by Levine rows of live electric
wires emitted small shocks to passersby. Here behavior is controlled
in an esthetic situation with no primary reference to visual
circumstances. As Levine insists, "What I am after here is physical
reaction, not visual concern."

This brings to mind some of the original intentions of the "Group de

Recherches d'Art Visuel" in the early 1960s. The Paris-based group
had sought to engage viewers kinesthetically, triggering involuntary
responses through ambient-propelled "surprises." Levine's emphasis
on visual disengagement is much more assured and iconoclastic;
unlike the labyrinths of the GRAV, his possesses no individual work
of art deflecting attention from the environment as a concerted
experience.

Questions have been raised concerning the implicit anti-art position

connected with Levine's disposable and infinite series. These hardly
qualify as anti-art as John Perreault has pointed out. Besides
emphasizing that the context of art is fluid, they are a reductio ad
absurdum of the entire market mechanism that controls art through
the fiction of "high art." They do not deny art, they deny scarcity as a
legitimate correlative of art.

The components of systems-whether these are artistic or functional-

have no higher meaning or value. Systems components derive their
value solely through their assigned context. Therefore it would be
impossible to regard a fragment of an art system as a work of art in
itself-as say, one might treasure a fragment of one of the Parthenon
friezes. This became evident in j December 1967 when Dan Flavin
designed six walls with the same alternate pattern of "rose" and
"gold" eight-foot fluorescent lamps. This "Broad Bright Gaudy
Vulgar System," as Flavin called it, was installed in the new ;
Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The catalog
accompanying the exhibition scrupulously resolves some of the
important esthetic implications for modular systems
The components of a particular exhibition upon its termination are
replaced in another situation. Perhaps put into non-art as part of a
different whole in a different future. Individual units possess no
intrinsic significance beyond their concrete utility. It is difficult either
to project into them extraneous qualities, a spurious insight, or for
them to be appropriated for fulfillment or personal inner needs. The
lights are untransformed. There are no symbolic transcendental
redeeming or monetary added values present. .

Flavin's work has progressed in the past six years from light sources
mounted on flat reliefs, to compositions in fluorescent fixtures
mounted directly on walls and floors, and recently to totalities such
as his Chicago "walk-in" environment. While the majority of other
light artists have continued to fabricate "light sculpture"-as if
sculpture were the primary concern-Flavin has pioneered articulated
illumination systems for given spaces.

By the fact that most systems move or are in some way dynamic,
kinetic art should be one of the more radical alternatives to the
prevailing formalist esthetic. Yet this has hardly been the case. The
best publicized kinetic sculpture is mainly a modification of static
formalist sculpture composition. In most instances these have only
the added bonus of motion, as in the case of Tinguely, Calder, Bury,
and Rickey. Only Duchamp's kinetic output managed to reach
beyond formalism. Rather than visual appearance there is an entirely
different concern which makes kinetic art unique. This is the
peripheral perception of sound and movement in space filled with
activity. All too often gallery kinetic art has trivialized the more
graspable aspect of motion: - this is motion internalized and
experienced kinesthetically.

There are a few important exceptions to the above. These include

Otto Piene's early "Light Ballets" (1958-1962), the early (1956)
water hammocks and informal on-going environments of Japan's
Gutai group, some works by Len Lye, Bob Breer's first show of
"Floats" (1965), Robert Whitman's laser show of "Dark" (1967), and
most recently, Boyd Mefferd's "Strobe-Light Floor" (1968).

Formalist art embodies the idea of deterministic relations between a

composition's visible elements. But since the early 1960s Hans
Haacke has depended upon the invisible components of systems. In
a systems context, invisibility, or invisible parts, share equal
importance with things seen. Thus air, water, steam, and ice have
become major elements in his work. On both coasts this has
precipitated interest in "invisible art" among a number of young
artists. Some of the best of Haacke's efforts are shown outside the
gallery. These include his Rain Tree, a tree dripping patterns of
water; Sky Line, a nylon line kept aloft by hundreds of helium-filled
white balloons; a weather balloon balanced over a jet of air; and a
large-scale nylon tent with air pockets designed to remain in balance
one foot off the ground.

Haacke's systems have a limited life as an art experience, though

some are quite durable. He insists that the need for empathy does
not make his work function as with older art. Systems exist as on-
going independent entities away from the viewer. In the systems
hierarchy of control, interaction and autonomy become desirable
values. In this respect Haacke's Photo-Electric Viewer Programmed
Coordinate System is probably one of the most elegant, responsive
environments made to date by an artist (certainly more sophisticated
ones have been conceived for scientific and technical purposes).
Boundary situations are central to his thinking.
A "sculpture" that physically reacts to its environment is no longer
to be regarded as an object. The range of outside factors affecting it,
as well as its own radius of action, reach beyond the space it
materially occupies. It thus merges with the environment in a
relationship that is better understood as a "system" of interdependent
processes. These processes evolve without the viewer's empathy. He
becomes a witness. A system is not imagined, it is real.

Tangential to this systems approach is Allan Kaprow's very unique

,concept of the Happening. In the past ten years Kaprow has moved
the Happening from a rather self-conscious and stagy event to a strict
and elegant procedure. The Happening now has a sense of internal
logic which was lacking before. It seems to arise naturally from those
same considerations that have crystallized the systems approach to
environmental situations. As described by their chief inventor, the
Happenings establish an indivisibility between themselves and
everyday affairs; they consciously avoid materials and procedures
identified with art; they allow for geographical expansiveness and
mobility; they include experience and duration as part of their
esthetic format; and they emphasize practical activities as the most
meangingful mode of procedure. . . As structured events the
Happenings are usually reversible. Alterations in the environment
may be "erased" after the Happening, or as a part of the Happening's
conclusion. While they may involve large areas of place, the format
of the Happening is kept relatively simple, with the emphasis on
establishing a participatory esthetic.

The emergence of a "post-formalist esthetic" may seem to some to

embody a kind of absolute philosophy, something which, through
the nature of concerns cannot be transcended. Yet it is more likely
that a "systems esthetic" will become the dominant approach to a
maze of socio-technical conditions rooted only in the present. New
circumstances will with time generate other major paradigms for the
arts.

For some readers these pages will echo feelings of the past. It may
be remembered that in the fall of 1920 an ideological schism
ruptured two factions of the Moscow Constructivists. The radical
Marxists, led by Vladimir Tatlin, proclaimed their rejection of art's
false idealisms. Establishing ourselves as "Productivists," one of their
slogans became: "Down with guarding the traditions of art. Long live
the constructivist technician." As a group dedicated to historical
materialism and the scientific ethos, most of its members were
quickly subsumed by the technological needs of Soviet Russia. As
artists they ceased to exist. While the program might have d some
basis as a utilitarian esthetic, it was crushed amid the Stalinist anti-
intellectualism that followed.

The reasons are almost self-apparent. Industrially underdeveloped,

food and heavy industry remained the prime needs of the Soviet
Union for the next forty years. Conditions and structural
interdependencies that naturally develop in an advanced industrial
state were then only latent. In retrospect it is doubtful if any group of
artists had either the knowledge or political strength to meaningfully
affect Soviet industrial policies. What emerged was another vein of
formalist innovation based on scientific idealism; this manifested itself
in the West under the leadership of the Constructivist emigres, Gabo
and Pevsner.

But for our time the emerging major paradigm in art is neither an
ism nor a collection of styles. Rather than a novel way of rearranging
surfaces and spaces, it is fundamentally concerned with the
implementation of the art impulse in an advanced technological
society. As a culture producer, man has traditionally claimed the
title, Homo Faber: man the maker (of tools and images). With
continued advances in the industrial revolution, he assumes a new
and more critical function. As Homo Arbiter Formae his prime role
becomes that of man the maker of esthetic decisions. These
decisions- whether they are made concertedly or not-control the
quality of all future life on the earth. Moreover these are value
judgments dictating the direction of technological endeavor. Quite
plainly such a vision extends beyond politlcal realities of the present.
This cannot remain the case for long.